With José Anigo as their head of recruiting in Europe, Nottingham Forest’s likely pool of transfer targets was always going to be France.
However, there is one club the 58-year-old will always turn to as he will have an advantage over the competition, and that’s Marseille.
At the club between 2001 and 2015, Anigo served the Ligue 1 side in many different ways, managing them on three separate occasions, as well as acting as their director of football (2004-14) and a scout (2014-15), and therefore gained a wealth of connections along the way.
L’Equipe on Thursday explain Forest’s new head of recruiting is now putting them to good use to try and secure young players early on and bring them to City Ground.
The French newspaper explain he travelled down to the south of France on November 2nd 2019 to watch one of Marseille’s youngsters: 16-year-old Jorès Rahou.
The attacking midfielder is seen as one of the Ligue 1 club’s more promising talents, and Anigo was spotted talking to him after the game.
He even told L’Equipe: “Like a lot of foreign clubs, our scouts identify young French talents, and when there are some at Marseille, I don’t have an issue getting information”.
The way he does this is through a pair of agents, Pierre Issa and Salim Arrache, who have both played for Marseille during their time as footballers.
L’Equipe also revealed Anigo managed to have a chat with the father of Simon Ngapandouetnbu, a young 16-year-old goalkeeper, to talk up the Nottingham Forest project.
He’s not had the most luck so far, but he’ll keep trying, and as the newspaper point out, if there’s anything to know or a move to be made, he’ll know about it before most people.
